Over the past decade, private financial markets – the domain of venture capital, private equity, and private credit funds – have grown to the point where they now dominate financial activity. This shift has undermined the protections afforded by existing securities laws and, because pensions are one of the largest contributors to these private funds, has subjected ordinary workers to the opaque, unregulated side of financial markets.

Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice offered a more expansive perspective. This case should be seen, in part, as an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence that nevertheless remains within the framework of the Convention and retains its legibility to a court of law.

Of the estimated 350,000 chemicals now on the global market, only a handful have been properly tested. And as the looming crises with forever chemicals and micro-plastics make clear, we are only just beginning to grasp the enormous toll that these novel entities are taking on human health. How did our environmental law allow this to happen? And what can be done to correct it?

Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.

To be homeless, Jeremy Waldron has famously argued, is not merely to suffer from unmet needs – to be cold or hungry or exposed – but also to be unfree. In what sense, however, does homelessness make one unfree? And what is the relationship between this unfreedom and the law?

Today’s left social movements are increasingly turning to a framework of “non-reformist reform” to guide their efforts to build a just society. But what do non-reformist reforms require? How do they differ from liberal and neoliberal approaches to reform? And what role do law and lawyers have to play in advancing such reforms?